Blog 5 – Is this really the Gilded Age?

In the article “The Rockefellers and Class Warfare” the author Beverly Gage argues that with the rich getting ever so much richer and the poor staying just as poor today, that because of such inequality, we are entering into a new incarnation of what historians refer to as the Gilded Age. She makes a very good argument but leaves it to the reader to challenge her opinions by not offering a naysayer. Including a weak argument against her thesis could in fact strengthen her position.
While the author offers many examples on how the two time periods are very similar, she fails to mention any examples of economic differences between them. One might bring up the fact that today the economic inequality of the early 1900’s is irrelevant to today because the majority of our nation’s workforce falls into the “middle class” classification, one that was almost inexistent during the first “Gilded Age”. In her text she compares “us” to the poor class of the past. But she failed to tell the reader who “us” is today. By connecting “us” to the poor class of the past and the middle class of today, it would be a much clearer argument when she says “that the mega-rich have been growing ever-mega-richer while the rest of us have whiled away our time worrying about health-care deductibles and 3 percent raises”.